Record of Lunia War Diary #1

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Developer allm Corp. serves up an insightful look at the making of its arcade action massively multiplayer offering

By IGN Staff

The continent of Rodesia is home to humans, elves, hobbits, goblins, and trolls. Each worships a god that, according to ancient tales, created it. These guardian deities provide protection and other divine favors to their followers while requiring their devotion to maintain their respective powers. Although each race has its own territory, they may engage in trade, war and other forms of interaction. So, after the orcs attacked the humans, and the ensuing conflict somehow freed the dark elves from the magic that bound them, they were forced to ally against the new menace. However, the prospect of war remains.

Based within this fantasy-themed scenario, Record of Lunia War is a massively multiplayer title that developer allm calls an arcade RPG. This sub-category is defined by fast-paced action featuring limitless combination attacks initiated via keyboard commands, plus role-playing elements such as character advancement and a community system. Three player classes are available. The Knight is a relentless assailant, the supportive Healer can also deal damage with its magical wand, and the Wizard is a powerful long-range caster. Also of interest is the stage system, which involves story quests that can include side dungeons and raids along with the main phase.

Includes six exclusive images

The Birth of World Conqueror

The day we decided to make the game I still clearly remember that day. "Finally, we are going to make a game!" we shout and opened the door of our allm online service team. I will never forget our expectancy and excitement about the first step into the game industry that we all desired to take.

we tried to refer to other games, but there were none that gave us perfect solutions. The reason was that our game wasn't like updating an existing one by adding fun factors; it had been created from a blank slate

In 1997, the members were gathered for a Virtual Fighter battle team at an arcade center. This became the first meeting of allm's development team.

We established allm Corp., and did our best until we were recognized as the best web agency, especially in the movie and online marketing field, while we put aside our dream of game development. Because of this, we can never forget the excitement when we decided to make our game.

In the fall of 2003, the game industry was getting larger, and capital was being raised for it. We felt that this might be the last good chance to enter the industry, so we decided to advance into development, which we had wanted to do for a long time. Because we had played and discussed to prepare for the game for more than 10 years, it didn't take that long to decide to make an "arcade RPG" game, which is a whole new genre.

World Conqueror is formed Our team immediately began making the prototype of an arcade action RPG game. We also searched for team members who could achieve our goal together. Fortunately, although it was a new company, we found many talented, trustworthy team members who wanted to make the best game in the world. They were developers who picked our young company, allm, because of the newness and the challenge that we were pursuing.

Development meeting

Design plan presentation

The development team needed a name that would expresses our huge dream. We choose to use World Conqueror at the membership training stage. Finally we had a team name. The next step was making our first masterpiece, our arcade action RPG game. After long discussion, the title we chose for it was Record of Lunia War. This represents the animatic concept of the game, the nostalgia of old arcade games, and our fantasy world.

Start everything from scratch Even though we had many things to plan, we excluded taking approaches like "Because others do this, let's do it too." Instead, we decided to ask questions of ourselves - like "Why?" and "Is this really fun?" - even about little things.

For example, we started from the scratch on the concept of making a room. If we wanted to make it easy, we just needed to follow existing systems, just like other companies. However, our project team asked ourselves why users have to see the list of rooms, and concluded that such a list was not necessary. What we felt about the lobby systems of other games was all negative, such as needing a long time to find a proper room, expulsion, and ignorance of the other players. A hot topic among game designers was plan makers was improving this experience, and we agreed with that. Because we didn't want users to feel bored and angry, we adopted a different room system, and finally, current lobby scheme of Record of Lunia War was established.

We also asked ourselves "Is this only way?" and "Is it fun?" about everything such as our character advancement system, item distribution method, party play system and matchmaking... things that are regarded as trivial and insignificant in many other games. And we did our best to provide a better experience to our users.

Lunia concept art

The difficulty of being new, interesting and creative The initial idea behind Record of Lunia War was to choose only the advantages from two different genres, arcade and RPG, and based on them, to develop our first game as simply as possible. However, unlike our expectation, we had to develop both arcade game and an RPG at the same time. RPG numerical factors such as quickness, power and speed of attacks, and arcade factors such as delay, timing and range of attack all had to be considered.

There were many problems we faced to balance these factors. We were expecting to have fairly predictable data. However, we sometimes obtained totally unexpected results. For example, an unbeatable combination attack was created due to the player's real-time control. Every time such problems happened, we tried to refer to other games, but there were none that gave us perfect solutions. The reason was that our game wasn't like updating an existing one by adding fun factors; it had been created from a blank slate with our own ideas.